Author Profiling in Social Media: Age, Gender and Language Variety Identification

Tesis doctoral escrita por Francisco Manuel Rangel Pardo en la Universitat Politècnica de València, bajo la dirección del PhD. Paolo Rosso. La tesis fue defendida el 3 de junio de 2016 en la misma universidad, ante el tribunal compuesto por los doctores Núria Bel de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Raquel Martínez Unanue de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) y Rafael Berlanga Llavorí de la Universitat Jaume I. La tesis fue calificada con la puntuación de Sobresaliente Cum Laude.PhD thesis written by Francisco Manuel Rangel Pardo at the Universitat Politècnica de València, under the supervision of PhD. Paolo Rosso. The thesis was defended on June 3rd 2016, with the commitee formed by the doctors Núria Bel from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Raquel Martínez Unanue from Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) and Rafael Berlanga Llavorí from Universitat Jaume I. The thesis was graded with Excellent Cum Laude.Este trabajo ha sido parcialmente financiado por Autoritas Consulting SA (http://www.autoritas.net)

Evaluation and Sociolinguistic Analysis of Text Features for Gender and Age Identification

The paper presents an interdisciplinary study in the field of automatic gender and age identification, under the scope of sociolinguistic knowledge on gendered and age linguistic choices that social media users make. The authors investigated and gathered standard and novel text features used in text mining approaches on the author's demographic information and profiling and they examined their efficacy in gender and age detection tasks on a corpus consisted of social media texts. An analysis of the most informative features is attempted according to the nature of each feature and the information derived after the characteristics' score of importance is discussed

Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Algorithms for Author Age and Gender Identification

Author profiling is part of information retrieval in which different perspectives of the author are observed by considering various characteristics like native language, gender, and age. Different techniques are used to extract the required information using text analysis, like author identification on social media and for Short Text Message Service. Author profiling helps in security and blogs for identification purposes while capturing authors’ writing behaviors through messages, posts, comments, blogs, comments, and chat logs. Most of the work in this area has been done in English and other native languages. On the other hand, Roman Urdu is also getting attention for the author profiling task, but it needs to convert Roman-Urdu to English to extract important features like Named Entity Recognition (NER) and other linguistic features. The conversion may lose important information while having limitations in converting one language to another language. This research explores machine learning techniques that can be used for all languages to overcome the conversion limitation. The Vector Space Model (VSM) and Query Likelihood (Q.L.) are used to identify the author’s age and gender. Experimental results revealed that Q.L. produces better results in terms of accuracy

The Association Between Social Media Use and Hazardous Alcohol Use Among Youths : A Four-Country Study

Aims: To examine the continuing role of daily popular social media use in youth hazardous alcohol consumption in four countries across continents. Methods: A web-based survey was given to youths aged 15-25 in the USA (n = 1212), South Korea (n = 1192), Finland (n = 1200) and Spain (n = 1212). Hazardous alcohol use (alcohol use disorders identification test-C) was the dependent variable. Main independent variables measured daily use of different social media services. Controls included compulsive Internet use, offline belonging, psychological distress, impulsivity, risk-taking, age and gender. Linear regression models and mediation analyses with bootstrapping were done for each country. Results: Daily use of Facebook and Instagram was associated with higher hazardous alcohol use among youths in Finland, South Korea and Spain. Daily instant messaging was related to higher hazardous alcohol use among South Korean and Finnish youths. Daily YouTube use was associated with higher hazardous alcohol use among youths in South Korea, but lower hazardous alcohol use among youths in the USA and Finland. Daily Twitter use was related to lower hazardous drinking among youths in Finland but higher hazardous drinking among youths in Spain. The mediation analyses revealed that uploading pictures to social media is a possible facilitator of social media-related hazardous alcohol use among youths in the USA and Spain. Conclusion: Certain social media platforms might inspire and/or attract hazardously drinking youths, contributing to the growing opportunities for social media interventions.Peer reviewe

What is engaging content? : influence of the social media type of message on the consumer engagement

The process of communicating with consumers has changed dramatically with the rise of social media, as social networking sites have established themselves as a legitimate, direct and free-of-charge communication channel. Considering that content is fundamental to the social media sphere, as it does not depend solely on the brands to be created, it is important to understand the pertinence, significance and impact of brand page content on Facebook. A brief look at concepts like social media, social networking sites, consumer engagement and content allowed a more congruent selection of the path chosen. By exploring the impact that seven different types of social media content have on consumer engagement regarding Facebook brand page posts, this research aims to provide relevant insights for practitioners via the identification of patterns, links and insights. In order to achieve these goals, an online survey that encompassed real Facebook brand page posts was administered and provided interesting results. The seven types of content – seasonal, activity, corporate social responsibility, customer service, product awareness, brand awareness and reward – registered different results, proving that the type of content influences consumer engagement. Moreover, corporate social responsibility was the type of content most probable to stimulate consumer engagement, followed by reward. Besides this surprising result, an overall advantage of emotional appealing types of content over informational ones, as well as differences in both age and gender groups were registered

Who Says What about Whom: Cue-taking Dynamics in the Impression Formation Processes on Facebook

Social and Behavioral Sciences; Social Work; Law: 3rd Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)Social information processing theory claims that computer-mediated communication users form impressions of others they encounter on the Web by taking heuristic cues available in the environment. As social media offer various cues from the sides of both the target and unknown others, however, the way people utilize cues on the Web also has become more complex. This study explored which among these multiple cues primarily influenced CMC users in their impression formation processes in the context of a political candidate's Facebook profile. Based on social identification model of deindividuation, we particularly examined if and how the shared group identities in terms of age and sex influenced the cue-taking dynamics. Participants (N=544) were randomly assigned into one of the 16 conditions (2: positive vs. negative valence of others' comments on the candidate by 2: younger vs. older commenters' age by 2: candidate's age by 2: candidate's sex) and exposed to a Facebook profile with a fictitious candidate's photo and two comments with the commenters' photos before responding to a questionnaire measuring their impressions of the candidate (i.e., attractiveness and competence of the candidate, and participants' feelings toward the candidate). The results showed that others' comments were the most influential cues for all three dimensions of the impression, and that age or gender similarity between the candidate and the participants influenced mainly the perceived attractiveness the candidate. The 3-way and 4-way interactions indicated how complex the cue-taking dynamics on social media could become and prompted further research on the underlying mechanism.A five-year embargo was granted for this item

A Longitudinal Study of Factors that Affect User Interactions with Social Media and Email Spam

Given the rapid growth of social media and the increasing prevalence of spam, it is crucial to understand users’ interactions with unsolicited content to develop effective countermeasures against spam. This thesis focuses on exploring the factors that influence users’ decisions to interact with spam on social media and email. It builds upon prior work, which serves as a foundation for further research and conducting a longitudinal analysis. Our results are based on the analysis of 221 responses collected through an online survey. The survey not only gathered demographic information such as age, gender, and race but also collected data on education, spam training, interaction with spam, and experiences of being a victim of spam. With about 87% of respondents stating they sometimes, often, or always encounter spam on social media, only 23% interact with it sometimes, often, or always before knowing it was spam, and 10% sometimes, often, or always interact with social media spam after knowing it was spam. Of the 75% of the respondents who stated that they sometimes, often, or always encounter email spam, approximately 13% of the respondents stated that they sometimes, often, or always interact with email spam before knowing it is spam, and 6%s stated that they sometimes, often, or always interact with email spam after knowing it is spam. Although only 38% of the users stated that they may have been victims of social media spam and 21% stated that they may have been victims of email spam. Among the factors analyzed, only age had an effect on reporting email spam, but not social media spam. A STEM education was found to reduce the likelihood of being a victim of both social media and email spam, as well as reduce the likelihood of interacting with both email and social media spam, but only before users knew they were interacting with spam. Interestingly, formal spam training did not show any statistical significance in determining how users interact with, report, or become victims of social media spam, although there was an effect when observing the identification of email spam. To quantify the effect of different factors on individuals falling victim to spam on social media and email, a logistic regression analysis was performed. The research findings suggest that individuals with a higher attained degree and a STEM background are the least likely to be victims of spam